It doesn't have to be that granular. If one engineer is getting (deservedly) paid 50% more than another in the same role, the company owes it to that engineer to give them a title/role that reflects their merit/contributions, at the very least for their career progression.

Requiring titles and pay to be interchangeable doesn't solve any of the real problems trying to be solved here.

Instead of offering to pay you less, company suggests you apply for a less valuable role (or demotes you), and then pays you less.

Instead of offering to pay you more, company suggests you apply for a more valuable role (or promotes you), and then pays you more.

If a company is trying to lowball or discriminate, they'll just do it by title and wage, instead of just wage.

If a company is trying negotiate in good faith, it's made the process needlessly complex.

I don't see what problem this solves.

It would be equivalent to government pay grade.

Why is that the logical conclusion? That doesn't make sense to me at all.

Internally managing that many positions and requirements and putting up that many job postings is a nightmare. For applicants, I'm going to almost immediately leave a page with that many listings and look at other companies.

It's only "logical" if you ignore all other pressures to job postings and are only trying to game these laws, which I presume have some baked-in preventions for this. I know Colorado's equivalent law does.

The exercise of putting together job descriptions and requirements should be enough to narrow it down to probably fewer than 3 Roles.

Last I heard, Microsoft had 100 levels, and a dozen-ish tracks, which all had different (and sparse) mappings from level to salary.

Also, hiring managers sometimes invented additional tracks.

In most cases Microsoft hires software engineers for one of 9 levels: SDE, SDE2, and Senior all have 2 and principal has 3.

Those levels are the same for any engineering track (IC or manager).

There are some exceptions like vendors and partner+ positions, but those levels won’t overlap with the typical engineering job postings.

Within the context of Microsoft: we often interview people for a Senior role, find a good candidate and make an offer, while at the same time making an SDE2 offer to someone else who did well on the interview but doesn’t seem ready for senior. Since the SDE2 salary range will be different than Senior (there is some overlap), I wonder how that works with the law.